Kieran Healy and Brian Weatherson, among others, have been discussing the absence of women at the top levels of economics and analytic philosophy. For example, all the winners of the JB Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences have been men.

Kieran is mainly concerned to dismiss the idea that this reflects some fundamental difference between men and women. He takes the hypothesis of discrimination within the occupational groups as the alternative, more or less by default.

I’d argue that the bulk of the explanation can be found in high school or earlier.

Kieran Healy and Brian Weatherson, among others, have been discussing the absence of women at the top levels of economics and analytic philosophy. For example, all the winners of the JB Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences have been men.

Kieran is mainly concerned to dismiss the idea that this reflects some fundamental difference between men and women. He takes the hypothesis of discrimination within the occupational groups as the alternative, more or less by default.

I’d argue that the bulk of the explanation can be found in high school or earlier. Girls do relatively well in language and boys in mathematics. Although I have no data, the disproportion seems to be higher the further up the performance scale you go, so that the very best students (the future PhDs) are highly gender-segregated. Given the incredible power of social pressures in high school, I think it’s reasonable to assume that this outcome is generated by social stereotypes rather than by differences in genes.

The difference in high school outcomes has an immediate effect in terms of the fields of study chosen by undergraduates, but there are more subtle effects that emerge only later. In undergraduate economics classes, students with the ability to write a coherent and grammatical sentence are rare enough that it’s possible to do quite well without the kinds of formal reasoning skills that are most naturally acquired from doing maths.

But the further you go the less true this is. At the graduate level, lousy prose will be forgiven but inadequately formalised arguments will not (at least, not until you’ve established your credentials with enough of the formal stuff that you can get away with leaving out the details). So the forces of comparative advantage encourage bright women to leave economics and move to fields where their skills are better rewarded.

There has to be more to it than that, and at this point the subtle forms of discrimination referred to by Kieran come into play. In particular, there’s a kind of tipping point at which the proportion of women is so low that some sort of differential treatment is almost inevitable. Of course, there are economics departments where there’s no need to look for subtle discrimination – it comes out and hits you in the face. This is, I think, less common and less blatant than in the past, but it’s still a problem.

Still I think the first place to look is high school.